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Air Quality with Mike Feldstein: Rational Wellness Podcast 422
08/06/2025
Air Quality with Mike Feldstein: Rational Wellness Podcast 422
Mike Feldstein discusses Air Quality with Dr. Ben Weitz. [If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on my .] Podcast Highlights Improving Indoor Air Quality for Better Health with Mike Feldstein In this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast, Dr. Ben Weitz discusses indoor air quality with Mike Feldstein, founder of Jaspr. Mike shares his journey from wildfire and mold restoration to developing a high-quality, quiet air scrubber designed for home use. They explore the impact of poor indoor air quality on health, the limitations of standard air purifiers, and practical tips for improving air quality at home. Mike highlights the importance of clean air, particularly in bedrooms, and offers insights into air filtration, mold detection, and the prevalence of microplastics. The episode emphasizes the need for greater air awareness in the wellness space and introduces Jaspr’s advanced air scrubber as a comprehensive solution. 00:00 Introduction to the Rational Wellness Podcast 00:26 Meet Mike Feldstein: Air Quality Expert 01:37 The Importance of Air Quality 06:09 Challenges in Indoor Air Quality 08:17 Wildfire Impact on Air Quality 14:17 Mold and Indoor Air Quality 24:02 Healthy Homes and Air Filtration 26:46 Cooking and Air Quality 27:30 Wildfire Smoke and Indoor Air Quality 28:11 Range Hood Efficiency Test 29:07 HVAC Systems and Air Circulation 31:33 Microplastics in Indoor Air 34:17 Sources of Microplastics 37:49 Impact of Pets on Indoor Air Quality 39:48 Optimizing Bedroom Air Quality 43:06 Jaspr Air Purifier Features 48:32 Special Offer and Conclusion __________________________________________________________________ Mike Feldstein is the founder of Jaspr, a high quality air scrubber, and an air quality expert. With a background in wildfire restoration, air quality consulting, and home remediation during some of the biggest natural disasters, Mike started Jaspr to innovate in air science and technology. His goal is to protect air quality and improve human health using the latest air quality science. You can learn more by going to . The cost of Jaspr is normally $1199, but if you use the discount code WEITZ for the next 2 weeks it will only be $799. Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure. Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Podcast Transcript Air Quality with Mike Felstein: Rational Wellness Podcast 422 Dr. Weitz: [00:00:00] Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates and to learn more, check out my website, dr whites.com. Thanks for joining me, and let's jump into the podcast. Hello, rational Wellness podcasters. Today I am excited to be having a discussion about indoor air quality with Mike Feldstein. I believe this is the first detailed discussion we've had on this podcast about indoor air quality. Mike Feldstein is the founder of Jasper. Which is a high quality air scrubber, and Mike is an air quality expert. He has a background in wildfire restoration, which is especially significant to those of us living in Los Angeles in [00:01:00] 2025. And he was also involved with air quality consult consulting, home remediation during some of the world's biggest natural disasters. Mike started Jasper. To innovate in air science and technology. And his goal is to protect air quality and improve human health using the latest air quality science. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to talk all things air with you. So I guess you're an airhead. Air snob, a snob. There you go. Perhaps you can tell us what you were doing for a living and how you became interested in air Mike: quality. Yeah, so it's kind of twofold. The big one was, my background was in wildfire flood and mold restoration. So we weren't doing it locally, we were traveling. So anywhere where the biggest disaster was in North America, that's where we were going. So California wildfires, [00:02:00] hurricane Harvey Canadian wildfires, floods, hailstorms, all that kind of stuff. So it was like really disaster response restoration. And the main thing that you do when you're remediating anything is you have to clean the surfaces and the air. People think about mold removal, but visually you only think mold remediation has like removing the mold. But that's not the case when you remove mold. You're isolating the environment, you're removing the physical materials and you're scrubbing the air inside and outside. So a lot of restoration and environmental cleanup, it's equal parts air as it is surface cleaning. And we would use these big machines called air scrubbers. They were huge, loud, they kind it like, like this, like big subwoofer looking things. Very loud, very industrial, but they clean the air incredibly well and. When I started comparing that to air purifiers that you would find out like a big what Walmart Best Buy, home Depot. What people [00:03:00] imagine when they think about an air purifier are the scrubber specs versus the purifier specs was almost like 20 to one, and I'm like. This doesn't really make much sense because people are buying air purifiers for wildfire smoke all the time, and it's way too small to get the job done. An analogy I like to use for people is it's like trying to heat your bathtub with a kettle, using a little air purifier to try to clean your air. It's tea. A kettle is fantastic if you're trying to make a pot of tea, but you cannot heat your bathtub with a kettle because it's gonna be cooling down faster than you can possibly heat it up. So the. I, and it was frustrating because we would remediate a home after wildfire or smoke, detox it, clean it three weeks later, it would be contaminated again, because often the ambient outdoor environments after a disaster would stay bad for months. So I'm like, okay, where can I find a. Beautiful air scrubber, a quiet air scrubber that people could leave in their homes [00:04:00] regularly, that wouldn't sound like a truck, and they didn't exist. So that's when I realized that, okay, there's lots of remediation and restoration companies, but how can there possibly be no product that works like a scrubber, but that is also quiet and beautiful? So that kind of changed my path from all things restoration to just completely focusing on air. And then the other side of that was when we would, in between disasters, we would do air consulting. So if somebody was sick at home and they didn't know why, we would come to their home and test everything to figure out if something might be lingering in their environment that's keeping them sick. And people generally, water and air and EMF and everything, it's the normal is not good. So I kind of just. I realized that a lot of people are quite water aware, they're diet aware, they're movement aware, but air awareness relative to all these other big health inputs was completely un. You know, it wasn't getting the time and attention that it needs. And I started [00:05:00] seeing people have a huge be health benefits by improving their air. So I went all in. Dr. Weitz: It's definitely the case that those of us in the wellness community are really focused on the food we eat, the what we drink, the water, the pure purity of that. And we focus much less on the air, but yet we breathe a lot more air than we eat food or drink water. Mike: Yeah. So, to put it into perspective for people. The average person, let's say, eats two pounds of food a day, two or three pounds of food, drinks a gallon or so of water. But you can, you breathe up to 17,000 liters of air. You can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and only three minutes without air. Air is the first thing breathing. It's funny with food, we talk more about the food that than we eat than how we eat it. We talk about the water, not how we drink it, but breath work and breathing gets a lot more conversation. This breath and breathing [00:06:00] gets a lot of attention while we're ignoring the actual air that we're breathing. The air is the fuel that you're breathing and people are completely ignoring their fuel source. Dr. Weitz: So what are some of the biggest issues with indoor air quality? And I say this here in Santa Monica, California, right next to Pacific Palisades where we had these horrific fires. And I imagine the stuff being spewed into the air is probably not over. 'cause first you got the fires, then you got, they're quite, in a way, they're digging out the soil. And then we're gonna have all this massive construction happening soon here. Mike: So the big picture, the issue is. Roughly since the seventies, homes have been optimized to be airtight boxes, so they're incredibly tight. They're built to be energy efficient, keep the cool in, in the summer, keep the warm air, and in the winter. Now, if you think about a pond, if you think about a moving [00:07:00] stream or a current or a river, generally moving water. Clean water. Right? But when a stagnant pond, that's where you get algae, bacteria, mosquitoes. If you can imagine all the things that you see growing when water is stagnant. So outdoor air is free flowing. It's like the lakes, it's like the oceans. But we've built our homes. Basically our homes are little stagnant ponds. So because there's no air movement in our homes, this is where everything starts to grow and starts to fester. Plus, we spend like 95% of our times indoors on average. So there's a reason why you don't walk down the street and have mold problems, or have dust problems, or have VOC problems. These are indoor problems. Our homes are incredibly tight, and the greatest air purifier of all time is nature. The UV light from the sun, wind, rain trees, but we've trapped all that outside. We've trapped ourselves inside, and then we have thousands of chemicals in our homes from the paints to the flooring, the adhesives, the fire retardants, cooking [00:08:00] pets, and it just can't breathe. It has no airflow. So generally speaking, the problem is with how we build homes and how we live in a modern society. That is causing all of these problems, especially like, and then in a wildfire setting, you are absolutely right. So you ha like people ha, when you test the air quality and water quality and soil quality, it can stay bad for a very long time after a fire. And the recent LA fires in January are unique, like one I've never seen before because I've never seen that many homes burnt in that concentration. But also. That many electric cars. So I'm very curious like what happens when you burn four, 5,000 lithium batteries? We know, and everyone's been at a campfire where someone throws the bag of marshmallows in and they're like, that even looks and feels very toxic. So now imagine scaling that up to like a billion x when you have everything in every home that burnt every can of paint. The [00:09:00] walls, the floors, the furniture, the chemicals, the cleaning products, the cars, their batteries. So it's a very toxic soup. And then, yeah, so you have all that, of course, that gets in the soil and it gets in the water, and then every time that the wind blows, the ash kicks up more and more. And then, yeah, then you'll have your rebuild phase. It's a pretty big deal. Dr. Weitz: I know every day I would go out to my car after the fires and it would just be covered in soot and then you just think, oh my God, how much of that is getting into my lungs? Mike: A lot. And it's a tough situation because, and like a lot of people in LA, because the city is so vast, a lot of homes, it was unclear the amount of damage because. A lot of you go into your home, and if you don't. See piles of ash everywhere. You just figure, my home's fine. Its smelled smoky a couple weeks ago. It's all good now, but it doesn't really work that [00:10:00] way. Be if you test anybody who didn't detox their home in la now if you test their carpets, their couches, their bedding for hexavalent chromium, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or heavy metals. If you don't detox it and pull it out, just think about our bodies, how many years we can hold heavy metals and things if we don't detox it out. So every porous material in your home is the exact same, and a lot of people don't remediate and detox their homes because they don't realize that they need to. Dr. Weitz: Can you even detox that stuff out? Do you have to just throw out everything that's porous? The poor stuff is pretty hard to deal with. You're talking about mattresses and carpets and furniture and stuff, so it depends like Mike: which way the wind was blowing your proximity to the fire. So that's why TE testing can be a decent idea for people. Also, depends if people had good air filtration in their homes beforehand. So. If somebody had significant air filtration in their home, [00:11:00] then likely most of those particulates were being captured before they had a chance to settle on surfaces. But typically, all of the hard surfaces can be cleaned up, but the soft surfaces would be replaced. But it's not black and white at all. Actually created on YouTube. Oh, yeah we put it on YouTube recently. If people look on our YouTube and type in like Jasper Smoke course it used to be. Like an email thing, but now it's just totally free and it's on YouTube. So after the fire is up, I was chatting with everybody like an hour, several hours a night about their unique situation and 99% of those conversations was, were the exact same. So I just created a bunch of videos on how to assess your own home, do you, should you go with insurance, how to vet your contractors, how to detox your own home. All that kind of stuff. So people want, if anyone wants to dive deeper into smoke detox, it's all available on YouTube. Dr. Weitz: Interesting. And then and then I guess after all that, then detox your body as well [00:12:00] that I don't Mike: have experience in, but that's absolutely a good idea. You, you'd be the guy for that. Yeah. And if you think about it, like when a lot of people are sick at home, the their aha air moment. Often occurs when they go on a trip or they go camping and then they feel great and then they come home and they're sick again. And they have this moment, is my home making me sick? So if you're not optimizing for the, like your home, that's your fish tank. And if you think about how would you clean a swimming pool, you use a water filter. You don't jump in the pool and use a sponge and scrub the sides. You need to filter the water constantly, right? And. In a home, people are spending a lot of time and energy and money on mopping and vacuuming and wiping counters, and that's all great. But if you don't, if you don't also have a strategy in place to filter your air, you're just that. You're just in the swimming pool, scrubbing the sides and not filtering the water. And [00:13:00] guess what happens if you don't filter that pool of water? It turns green real fast, so people's indoor air, you cannot see it. Most of the time, but wow. When we test air, it's usually off the charts. Typically, we see indoor air that's five to 10 times dirtier than outdoor air. Dr. Weitz: So how do you find somebody, what's the best way to test the inside of your house? You have to have an expert come in and test it. Do they? How do you know? Mike: You know, so I used to be, that's what I used to do. Okay. And I can't tell you a time when I'd ever go into a home where if I tested someone's air or water, that it was good. Like it just isn't. Okay. Indoor air is pretty much always bad, so the practical way to test, there's a few things to look for, but a pr a practical thing, like you could go and pay $1,500 or more for an expert to come into your home, but, and I was that guy, but I did not feel good because the 80 20 like. They would've been better [00:14:00] off just getting the solutions. Dr. Weitz: Okay. Mike: Because, you know, just assume your home is toxic. If you want to verify it. And depending on people's budgets and everything, like if you test your home for mold, indoor and outdoor, there's always mold. I always tell people, if you ever wanna break a lease, call me. I'll come over and I'll find the mold. Well, Dr. Weitz: you need to talk about that a little more because mold's a big topic in the functional medicine world and we talk a lot about testing. You're home for mold testing, the body for mold, and there's a lot of controversy. Oh no, this test is not accurate. It's showing mold and maybe you don't really have mold, but I've heard you say before, and you just said here, that pretty much everybody has some degree of mold in their home. Mike: And in their body, like when have you ever done a test and seen zeros? That's not how it works. It's, Dr. Weitz: well, you know, it's interesting. I think that makes sense because mold is an important constituent of the environment. In fact, it's in the soil, you know, just like bacteria are. And the goal is not to [00:15:00] rid ourselves of all bacteria and all fungi. Mike: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. People know what happens if you take too much antibiotics, like you kill your immune system, right? So yeah, it's, people got this idea that like mold is the big enemy. The problem is you're, if you think about that piece, that sandwich. Out on the counter, not so bad. You put it in the Tupperware, it starts growing mold, and your home is essentially a big Tupperware box. So you have mold issues because if you live in a airtight home with no ventilation and no filtration, that's the real problem here. So typically when you do test for mold indoors, you always want to test outside and you want to test inside. And if you don't test outside, the test is completely useless. Because that's your control sample. So if it rained there, could the spore count is gonna be incredibly high inside and outside. Your indoor air comes from outside. So [00:16:00] if people have a noticeable odor in their home, it smells musty. Or if they've had water damage, if they've had leaks. Like if you have visible mold in your home, that is a time when you want to get restoration and remediation done. If it smells really strong of must and mold, that's when you may want to go and look for it. But I've seen a lot of people who, I call it whacka mold because they're just looking all over, you know, they're dealing with a little leak here and a little thing there, and they're cutting open this wall. Next thing you know, it's like investigative surgery of your home. And then, you know, next thing you know, you're living in another home for six months or 12 months and you're displaced and it costs a fortune. And a lot of people like it's not a black and white situation. And when I hear people talking about it, it's like, I've got the mold like. If you take a thousand people and you test everybody's home and bodies for mold, everybody has...
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